Dateline: 30 April 2017

This blog post might reveal my most helpful gardening discovery yet.

Regular readers of my gardening adventures know I became interested in no-till gardening last year and began planting cover crops. The photo above, taken last fall, shows one bed with an oat cover crop and another with mustard.

I didn’t have time to add cover crops to my Minibeds-on-Plastic garden last year, but as my report explains, they will be crucial to my minibed approach. Keep this in mind as you read on.

Tilling a cover crop into the soil, like in the picture, would create “green manure.” However, I aim to avoid tilling with my no-till method.

My goal is to encourage root growth below the surface and leave them undisturbed. Living roots foster a healthy, thriving soil ecosystem. As the plants die, their roots decompose and nourish the soil, while the above-ground biomass acts as mulch, further protecting and enriching the soil.

Importantly, cover crops significantly enhance soil tilth, making it looser and easier to work with – a gardener’s dream, especially during spring planting.

I recently experienced this firsthand in the oat-covered bed from the first picture. Here’s a photo of that bed during a winter thaw.

And this is what it looked like in spring.

Look closely, and you’ll notice some large leaves trapped beneath the oats last fall. I also spread shredded leaves between the oat rows, further enhancing the bed’s condition.

Here, I’m digging a furrow for onion sets earlier this spring.

The picture doesn’t fully convey how incredibly loose and easy to dig the soil was. It was the most effortless spring planting experience ever. I simply parted the oat and leaf cover, using my Whizbang pocket cultivator to create a furrow beneath the string line. Never before have I planted onions in spring with such ease.

The soil structure is significantly better than if I had used only leaf mulch over winter. This cover-cropping and no-till gardening combination seem to create a synergistic improvement in soil tilth.

For comparison, here’s another garden bed with no cover crop, mulch, or occultation cover, photographed on the same day.

This exposed bed is hard due to months of rain and snow. It needs rain to revitalize the lifeless soil before it can be cultivated, requiring much more effort than the oat-covered bed.

The takeaway is clear and compelling: cover cropping enhances and preserves soil structure, enabling easy, no-till gardening. I’m more convinced than ever that combining simple cover cropping, no-till techniques, and manageable minibed “islands” surrounded by black plastic mulch will make for a very successful Minibeds-on-Plastic gardening system.

However, the true test will be the upcoming growing season as I plant and tend the Minibeds-on-Plastic garden. Stay tuned!

Before I wrap up, here’s a recent photo of one of my bush-planted elderberries (explained in my Planet Whizbang Idea Book For Gardeners). You can see strings connecting the elderberry canes to the post.

Notice the onion bed from earlier in the background. I’ve planted three other beds (including the one with hard soil) with spring cover crops – oats, rye, and mustard – as an experiment. I can cut them down and plant directly into the beds whenever I choose.

Also, note the minibeds with Solar Pyramids in the background (some on the right aren’t positioned and staked yet).

(click on any of the pictures to see larger views)